This vignette outlines how to produce GTFS timetables for the heavy rail network using ATOC CIF files.
Data for train timetables can be downloaded from the Rail Data Portal.
library(UK2GTFS)
nrdp_timetable("myfolder/timetable.zip")Note that you need to register a free account with the Rail Data
Portal. Any you need to set the NRDP_username and
NRDP_password values in in your .Renviron
file. You can use usethis::edit_r_environ() to easily
access your .Renviron file. Remember to restart R after
updating the file.
You can also use the nrdp_fares() and
nrdp_routing() functions to download additional data.
To do a simple conversion to GTFS, load the package, and use the
atoc2gtfs function. The function requires the following
arguments.
path_in is the file path to the ATOC timetable file,
this comes a zipped folder with a name like
ttis627.zip
ncores If > 1 then multicore processing is used to
speed up the processing. Always leave one spare core for your OS.A simple example is shown below:
path_in <- "myfolder/timetable.zip"
gtfs <- atoc2gtfs(path_in = path_in,
ncores = 3)Once the conversion has been completed, you can save the GTFS file.
gtfs_write(gtfs,
folder = "C:/GTFS",
name = "gtfs_rail")This will save the GTFS file to
C:/GTFS/gtfs_rail.zip
CIF Files are available from Network Rail, the formatting is slightly
different and so a separate function nr2gtfs() is
provided.
The atoc2gtfs() function gives some customization
options to how the GTFS file is built. It is also just a wrapper around
other functions in the package. This section will explain the main
steps.
After unzipping the folder, the reading of the ATOC data is done with the following functions:
importMCA() the main file with the timetable data,importFLF() optional file used if
transfers = TRUE
importMSN() optional file used if
locations = "file"
Other files are currently ignored.
The timetable data refers to locations such as stations, junctions,
etc. using a TIPLOC id. The locations of these are stored in the
.msn file, but are not always accurate. Therefore the
package comes with a tiplocs object which includes improved
location
data for TIPLOCS.
The additional locations and other additional data are managed by the UK2GTFS-data repo. Contributions of new or improved locations are welcome via pull request.
If you wanted to build using the locations included in the ATOC data,
then you can use locations = "file" in
atoc2gtfs() or manually build the stops using
station2stops().
The data required to create the GTFS agency.txt file is
not present in the ATOC CIF files. Therefore the package contains an example
file instead. Contributions to this file are welcome via pull
request.